Category: Color
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text selection tokens: the color nobody decided
Drag-select a sentence on almost any site and you’re looking at a decision nobody actually made. Every browser ships a default highlight color for selected text, usually some flavor of blue, and most design systems never touch it. That’s fine right up until the blue clashes with a dark, teal-and-purple brand and nobody can say…
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focus ring tokens: the accessibility feature people delete without meaning to
`outline: none;` is one line of CSS that quietly breaks keyboard navigation for every user tabbing through the page. Here’s how to token a real focus ring instead.
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status tokens: no new colors, just roles
Every team hits the same moment: the app needs a success state and an error state, and someone picks two new hex codes that have never appeared in the design file before. Those two colors turn into four within a sprint (warning, info) and none of them were chosen against the palette that already shipped.…
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button state tokens: the three states nobody designs
A button has five real states, not two. Default and hover get designed; active, disabled, and loading get left to accident. Here’s how to name and token all five.
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dark mode tokens: why inverting your palette doesn’t work
Flip every hex value for dark mode and the depth disappears — a card that read as “elevated” in light mode goes flat, because that depth was never really in the color. The instinct to treat dark mode as an inversion makes sense on the surface: light backgrounds become dark, dark text becomes light, done.…
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wcag and design systems: why accessibility belongs in the token layer
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in Accessibility, Color, css, Figma, Fonts, Iconography, Sites, Styleguides, Tokens, UI KIt, UI/UX, Web DesignWCAG compliance isn’t a checklist you run at the end — it’s a constraint you build into the system at the token level. A lot of designers treat accessibility as a QA pass: ship the design, then check the contrast ratios. That approach fails at scale because it moves the problem downstream where it’s expensive…
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color systems
A palette comprises a collection of colors, while a color system establishes rules for color usage across three tiers: primitives (raw values), semantics (assigned meanings), and components (which utilize these meanings). This structure allows for streamlined updates across surfaces, enabling automatic adjustments for themes and branding changes.
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i built a design system business in 6 weeks using only claude code
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in AI, Automation, Color, Components, Educational, Illustrations, Images, Sites, Styleguides, Tokens, Typography, UI/UX, Web DesignSix weeks from first commit to a deployed product site, a content pipeline, a Gumroad membership, and a MailerLite funnel — one designer, one tool, no team. On April 25, 2026 I ran git init in a Google Drive folder. On June 5 I had a functioning design system business: a static site deployed to…
